Wednesday, January 30, 2013

This is my first post of the week. I've been sick (hack hack) with the flu since Sunday and have been away from the Interwebs. I hope y'all (hack hack) had a good beginning of the week (hack hack), and I look forward (HACK) to enjoying some of it with ya.

I know the above leaves some to the imagination (hack hack), so if you need something a little more...well, MORE...here ya go.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

I haven't really been able to get motivated to post as much as I'd like this past week. Also, my own writing is sort of falling to the wayside though that writing is nominally the way I get in touch with my Higher Power. IDK

This is my goto song right now for my recovery and for a piece that is at least marinating in my head. Hopefully, both will come to fruition.

Just like Sylvia Plath and Queen Victoria, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman — champion of scientific culture, graphic novel hero, crusader for integrity, holder of the key to science, adviser of future generations, bongo player — was a surprisingly gifted semi-secret artist. He started drawing at the age of 44 in 1962, shortly after developing the visual language for his famous Feynman diagrams, after a series of amicable arguments about art vs. science with his artist-friend Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian — the same friend to whom Feynman’s timeless ode to a flower was in response. Eventually, the two agreed that they’d exchange lessons in art and science on alternate Sundays. Feynman went on to draw — everything from portraits of other prominent physicists and his children to sketches of strippers and very, very many female nudes — until the end of his life.

Matt Rettenmund has a huge post on the 125 hottest porn stars running from the 70s to today. I haven't got to look at the whole list but I've already seen enough that I know I'll enjoy it. (Just before the lovely image of Colby Keller, I was treated with images of Leo Giamani and Johnny Hazzard!)

Kentucky Senator and professional thorn in my side Rand Paul plans to announce a bill to nullify President Obama's Executive Orders on Gun Control...because, you know, having things than kill people is WAY more important that people.

Yesterday Sen. Rand Paul announced a bill that he claims will "nullify" President Obama's executive orders on gun control.

The news was first reported during the Fox News show “The Five” on Wednesday by anchor Eric Bolling. “I’m told Sen. Rand Paul will introduce language within hours, within hours, to call for the nullification and prohibition of funding for the president’s executive actions announced today and possibly even using the federal courts to nullify and defund some of the things that he plans on doing,” Bolling said. The Capitol Hill source told TheDC that Paul’s legislation is expected to do three things: nullify Obama’s executive orders, defund them and ask the Senate to file a court challenge to them.

Paul says: "Our founding fathers were very concerned about us having separation of powers. They didn't want to let the president become a king."

*As with Rush Limbaugh, I present you Cute Puppy so I don't have to sully my blog or your eyes with an image of Paul.

After the tragic suicide of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, hacktivist group Anonymous vowed to derail picketing efforts by the hate-mongering members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who threatened to picket Swartz's funeral on Tuesday. When members of Anonymous and supporters showed up to block the WBC's picket line, the quasi-religious group was nowhere to be seen.

Westboro Baptist Church on Sunday announced plans to protest Swarz's open funeral in a press release titled "GOD H8S Cyber Criminal THUGS."

”Cyber criminals are the latest face of this nation's and this world's raging at God and His Servants at WBC," reads the Westboro press release, via Twitter account @WBCSays. “Now the gloves are off, cyber rebels! ... We will picket the funeral, the LORD willing, so that in that Great Day of His Wrath, your blood is not on our hands."

A crowd showed up to the funeral home in Highland Park, Ill., on Tuesday, willing to stand in the way of Westboro members to prevent them from getting close to the procession, according to a tweet sent from Anon-affiliated account @Anon2World. According to a tweet from Anonymous mouthpiece account @YourAnonNews, the WBC's lawyer contacted police to say that WBC would not be attending the funeral.

Lofgren said many were "deeply troubled" as they learned more about how the Justice Department approached its case against Swartz. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who heads the House Oversight Committee, told HuffPost on Tuesday he had an investigator looking into the handling of the case.

"His family’s statement about this speaks volumes about the inappropriate efforts undertaken by the U.S. government," Lofgren wrote. "There’s no way to reverse the tragedy of Aaron’s death, but we can work to prevent a repeat of the abuses of power he experienced."

Yes, I know there is a chica in this photo, but that is Andrew Rannells, naked, on top of her. Apparently he plays Elijah in the show Girls, and for some reason, decides though he is obviously gay to attempt to get it on with one of the characters.

Monday, January 14, 2013

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your hose or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

Do Not Ramble, Though

I won’t ramble on about that.

Keep It Simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. ‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story ‘Eveline’ is just this one: ‘She was tired.’ At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.’

Have the Guts to Cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Sound like Yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

[…]

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

Say What You Mean to Say

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledly-piggledy, I would simply not be understood.

So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

Pity the Readers

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

For Really Detailed Advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, a more technical sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. E. B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

I learned Aaron Schwartz, a co-founder of Reddit, hanged himself Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, in New York City. In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of free -- yes, FREE -- scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an attempt to make them even more freely available. He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month.

What's crazy about this is, he was legally authorized to download those journals. He had approved access. He did it through JSTOR, and they actually refused to press charges against him and even argued against the Department of Justice charging him with anything, but the DoJ still slapped Schwartz with 13 felony counts, apparently with MIT's approval. [MIT and JSTOR has since backed down. - Writer]

Nothing new about this. In 1993, Steve Jackson Games was raided because someone writing games for them was suspected by the DoJ of stealing classified information from Bell South. Then it turned out this "classified information" was available for sale from Bell South, and in certain instances, was actually available for free. But the DoJ still pursued charges agains Steve Jackson and his company...and lost. The jury returned not guilty verdicts in 2 of the 3 charges, and the 3rd one was overturned in a scathing opinion by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

The quote affected me quite a bit. When my friend Rob killed himself, these were the questions that stayed with me for quite a while afterwards, but eventually I had to accept (I don't know if I actually have) that there was nothing that I or anyone could do. That no amount of care could fix what leads to a suicide. That what went wrong, went wrong so long ago that it is another story in another land that it is almost untouchable.

As the obituary says, Swartz had a history of depression but I'm sure the threat of potential prison time and the DoJ's investigation did not help. Very sad.

Maybe it was the lateness of the evening. I was tired and I'm sure by that point in the evening many of those attending the Golden Globes were as drunk as Glenn Close was pretending to be, but by the time Robert Downey Jr. took the stage to present Jodie Foster the Cecil B. DeMille Award, there was something very familiar about the general air of discourse among those presenting and accepting awards.

Something akin to when I'd had a glass or two of red wine or a shot (of 5) of bourbon and found myself at the bar of the local gay bar expounding to whatever Daddy who would continue to buy me alcohol on the benefits of socialism, the hurts of capitalism, why Obama is the bee's knees or why Lady Gaga should be crowned High Roman Emperor of all.

This is why IMHO Ms. Foster seemed as obfuscating as she did. Did she come out? But I thought she'd come out a while back? What is this thing about privacy? What? Didn't she say she was retiring? But today she said that she wasn't?

As the meme, says, "Go home, Ms. Foster, you are drunk."

Much as it appeared that the very cute Daniel Day-Lewis was falling (drunkenly) asleep on the microphone. (At any moment, I was expecting him to say, "Steven Spielberg! Man! I love you, man!") Lord! If he'd been at the gay bar, my alkie senses would have honed on him and scooped him up for a night of slurry debauchery! And I'm sure I would've used the line, "Hey. Wanna go home with me and prove for once and all that Abe WAS gay?"

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Hey, guys and gals. Just wanted to give you a heads up that I'm gonna take this week off from posting. No reason...though stuff has happened that has made me want to isolate just a bit, but the major reason is that I just can't seem to get myself going bloggerly so far this week, so I'm gonna go ahead and take off.

So anything short of Lady Gaga and Madonna dying in a mutual disaster, or I get married, I won't be here. Though I will definitely stop by and comment on the blogs I follow...Lord knows my will to "speak" is way too strong.

Have a good week. Most likely I'll be back Saturday...I can't skip my Weekend Dick.

"We're having a baby, Bri!" croons one of the leads on NBC's The New Normal. "This is our family. You, me and that kid forever."

It's a mini-boomlet, says real-life white gay dad and sociology professor Joshua Gamson. Not too long ago, he says, pop culture mainly defined gay men as promiscuous and deviant, rather than monogamous and devoted to their families.

"It does seem like a strong counter-stereotype of how gay men have been portrayed over the past, whatever, 50 years," he says.

Think about one of the most popular sitcoms on TV today, says Max Mutchnik, who helped create Will and Grace.

"Modern Family introduced us to the whole world of gaybies," he noted.